Category: Science

Why do I use Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs so often in my articles? Because it informs us of a universal key to a successful life as an individual and as a culture.

Culture. We all need one to live. However, if and when that culture becomes too rigid, too intolerant, it stops being the supportive, nurturing, positive context we all need for whole, healthy lives. We human beings are complex in our make-up, in how it is that we experience our world, our environment, and in how we, as individuals, want to respond and behave within it. Each of us, while we do all share an essential common core of basic needs: water, food, air, shelter, love…, as complex beings are also very different in many ways.

We all experience and relate to our world in a somewhat different manner. Some people are more oriented toward an auditory experience of the world. Some the visual, or the tactile. And there are many other aspects of our lives which we all approach in different measure, with varying degrees of passion. We all have available to us the realities of logic, mathematics, healing/medicine, art, architecture, music, taste/food, physical capabilities; balance, strength, motion, sensuality. There are so very many aspects of our lives and our world which we all can and do find ourselves drawn to, interested in, to varying degrees. And they are all equally valid*. What we find ourselves naturally drawn to is the path we need, as an individual living organism with both physical and spiritual components. The path which will lead us to realizing our individual developmental journey in this life. It is, in fact our developmental imperative. And, again, they are all equally valid*.

This reality, of individual developmental imperatives, while so common sensical and simple at it’s base, has profound implications for us within our cultures and interpersonal relationships. Currently, in many cultures, there is an expectation, sometimes a quite rigid expectation, that within the culture we should all follow a highly regimented common path. This can, and often does, apply within our interpersonal relationships and especially marriages. It can, and often does demand, that one party accept a subservient relationship to the other. Often, but by no means always, the subservient role is expected of the female. It is hard, real hard, (all but impossible?) to get in touch with and express one’s individual developmental imperative in such a situation. Someone may want to attempt the argument that then the subservient person is experiencing that difficulty then that is their developmental imperative at that moment (to learn it is impossible to experience self-actualization while being rigidly held to someone else’s expectations and rules?). What do you think?

Within healthy interpersonal relationships we often take on obligations. Couples take on the obligation of maintaining a household, raising children, working together toward common goals. Honoring one’s own developmental imperative does not mean being defiantly independent and resisting all cooperative efforts and arrangements in our lives. It does mean being in touch with and honest with ourselves. Honoring what we know to be our essential orientations and needs. When partners recognize this reality within their own and their partner’s life, and when the individual orientations and needs are not incompatible with the needs that exist within the partnership, then all’s well. As a matter of fact, it’s better than well, it’s excellent.

The only way it gets any better is when partners within a relationship not only recognize and honor one another’s individual developmental imperatives, but take an active interest in seeing one another succeed in expressing them.

Today in the world at large we see individual developmental imperatives being honored, or neglected, to varying degrees. Some cultures all but totally reject it. When a brutally enforced totalitarian expectation of conformity is present, individual developmental imperative hides in fear. Or there may be martyrs in it’s name. The individual developmental imperative seems to most often demand our attention by being gently insistent. However, if continually repressed there can be pressure that builds up behind it. It can cry out within our being for recognition and expression.

The same is true within families, or interpersonal relationships and marriages. It can require determination and personal effort in developing knowledge and reason for individual developmental imperative to find fertile ground. Personal insecurities can get in the way of one’s own ability to express one’s developmental imperative and it can cause us to try to repress it in others. Within close relationships knowledge of one another combined with trust and reliability are important.

We don’t come into this world “blank slates”. We arrive with a developmental imperative already well underway. Our spirit, our mind, our nervous system are already geared for the path that will serve us the best. And, if we are happy and accomplished at a skill which brings enlightenment, joy, and increased turn-on to life and well-being to others…then it is a win-win-win situation.

Again, there is work involved, and discipline. Work and discipline are not bad things when applied to the expression of that which we deeply love and seek to honor with our being. In that context work and discipline feel right and we recognize the value they can add to our achieving that which we desire.

*So why the asterisk, the caveat? Because there is something we need to acknowledge and honor in order to preserve our individual ability to access, explore and fulfill our lives. It is really very simple: we need to acknowledge and honor the basic needs and lives of everyone else as if they were our own. Which means if we perceive our developmental imperative as requiring us to harm others, to inflict physical, psychological and/or spiritual harm: mutilation, deprivation, destruction, upon others, then we need to rethink how we are interpreting our perceptions. It is likely that if we find ourself having such thoughts that they are an expression of anxiety and fear. Emotions often stemming from, at sometime in our past, our having been harmed, significantly physically, psychologically and/or emotionally mistreated. And/or quite possibly that we are suffering from a neurological impairment resulting from an insult to our brain. Possibly from a physical or chemical insult, or resulting from experiencing significant prolonged stress. What is needed is an experience of pervasive healing: and that experience will not manifest by harming others.

Last night I watched the movie “Me Before You”. It’s about a man who is quadriplegic after an accident with a scooter. Long story short, he decides he doesn’t want to live any longer with the limitations and pain he endures and …………….(spoiler alert) ……………………………ends his life.

The movie brings attention to the issues of assisted suicide, personal relationships and quality of life. It also begs the question of why on Earth is anybody still having to endure, long term, the medical issues of paraplegia or quadriplegia? By this I don’t mean why doesn’t everybody with paraplegia or quadriplegia kill themselves. I do mean that in cases in which a person’s spinal cord is severed in an accident, why aren’t we using the therapies that are known to result in the body healing this damage?

Although I’ve heard of others, for example, one involving the use of white blood cells that must be performed within a short time frame after the injury, what I am mainly referring to is stem cell therapy to facilitate healing of the spinal cord. Why isn’t this being performed regularly?

I have seen an excellent video of a mouse who had it’s spinal cord severed, and even after a period of time during which it experienced atrophy in the affected limbs, it was able to regain use of the affected limbs after a stem cell transplant. I just checked online and I was unable to locate that video (??). Where did it go? But mice aren’t people, right?

Remember Christopher Reeve? He played Superman in movies a couple decades or so ago. He suffered a spinal cord injury and spent years as a quadriplegic. During this time he became active as an advocate for issues relating to spinal cord injuries. Stem cell therapy is one issue he was involved with. I just looked at the Wikipedia article about him and it cites his work to get stem cell research funded. Research is a necessary prerequisite to treatment, however, research is not treatment. Why even mention this obvious truth? More on that later.

Shortly after his death I read an article in “Readers Digest” about a woman in South Korea that had suffered a spinal cord injury many years ago and who had recently received stem cell therapy. She was, according to the article, recovering use of the affected limbs. It was around 2004 when I read this article, it was a recent article at the time. I thought it poignant that this article should appear so shortly after Christopher Reeve’s death. It brought to mind the question of why didn’t he ever receive stem cell therapy?

What are the problems with stem cell therapy? Why isn’t it being used? When stem cell therapy first began receiving widespread coverage in the mainstream press, to my recollection, it was immediately coupled with the issue of having to use stem cells from aborted babies. So, essentially, stem cell therapy was given a “black eye” right out of the gate. Dead babies? If we open the door to stem cell therapy we’re going to be up to our eyeballs in aborted fetuses, right? Women will be selling their unborn babies so rich folks can have stem cell therapy, right? Women might even be getting pregnant just to have a fetus to abort and sell. Horrible, but not an unthinkable scenario. And the media saw to it we were all thinking it. Stem cell therapy was cast in the roll of the therapy from hell: avoid it at all costs.

Stem cell therapy isn’t the only potential treatment to undergo this type of demonization. How many decades did “Reefer Madness”, and other misinformation define the public perception of marijuana? (And still does in some places.)

However, during the 1990’s there was another, infinitely less, publicized event taking place in the State of Washington, U.S.A. A company named CellPro, in Bothell, Washington, was working on a method of extracting stem cells from an adult human body that could be used by the person they were extracted from for stem cell therapy. Pretty anti-climatic in comparison to being led to believe stem cell therapy would lead to the gates of hell being greased with the bodies of dead fetuses. From the point of view of selling news with sensationalism, I can see why the CellPro story might not be appealing to the marketing folk down at the press. But is that the only reason most people in the world have never heard of CellPro nor their success? That’s right, success.

During the 1990’s, CellPro successfully developed a method of extracting stem cells from an adult human being that can be used by that person for stem cell therapies. No chance of rejection, no lifetime of anti-rejection medications, and maybe that touches on why it received so little publicity (?). CellPro’s relatively inexpensive method was successfully used to save one life, one. A case involving cancer. Did I mention it was planned to be relatively inexpensive, around $10,000 at the time? Again I find myself asking: is that touching on why most people in the world have never heard of CellPro? If you want to know what happened to this company and the blessing they were getting ready to unleash on the human race, there is a book about it. The person who’s life was saved wrote a book.

He was the CEO of CellPro. The book is: “Patient Number One”, by Rick Murdock and David Fisher. If you’re interested in learning more about the convoluted interrelationship between medicine, big business, government, and the people affected by it, I recommend this book. It’s not an easy read, but it’s worth it.

Again, long story short, CellPro was, in effect, shut down by a U.S. District Court judge. At the very least the judge’s ruling made sure the words “relatively inexpensive” would no longer be applicable. The reality turned out to be that, in effect, CellPro’s fate was sealed. That was a U.S. District Court protecting us…from what? Good health care?

As I mentioned above, medical research is not medical treatment. Obvious? Should be, but the reality in the U.S. has to give one pause. In an article updated in 2005 on NBC News.com, the amount spent on medical research, each year, in the U.S. was 95 billion (with a “B”) dollars. What should we be expecting for 95 billion dollars a year? Are we getting it? There can be no doubt that there is BIG money in medical research. How about cures? Maybe not so much? Look what happened to CellPro with their relatively inexpensive method of procuring transplantable stem cells. What’s that about? The fact is medical research is often touted as if it were treatment. It’s not.

There are a significant number of people, and I would say an increasing number of people, in the U.S. and elsewhere that suspect treatments which would actually cure various diseases are, when discovered, buried, kept secret, in order not to jeopardize the multi-billion dollar medical research industry. The case of CellPro definitely pushes this notion a step away from the realm of conspiracy theory and into the realm of conspiracy fact.

The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation has a website which gives estimated costs for individuals living with a spinal cord injury. The least figure they give is for “Incomplete motor function (any level)”. Those costs are given as: $347,484 the first year and $42,206 every year thereafter. The lifetime estimated costs for someone in this category who experiences the injury at 25 years of age, are given as: $1,578,274. From there, as they get into the costs of paraplegia and other more profound loss of ability, the costs, as one would expect, go up. A lot.

Compare this with the costs of one time stem cell transplant with no ongoing anti-rejection medication needed. Tripling what, in the 1990’s, CellPro estimated would be their costs in obtaining the needed stem cells, from your own body, would put that cost at around $30,000. Then there would be the cost of the implant itself, an injection. If we think extortionate costs for that procedure, that might be around $100.000. Even at extortionate pricing it doesn’t come close to the estimated costs for a lifetime of medication, medical devices, ongoing medical evaluation, caregivers and whatever else would enter in. But what does that have to do with anything?

Is the system of medical care in the U.S. and the treatments employed the best in the world? Let’s hope not. I’m sure most of the medical industry’s P.R. folks would use descriptors like: excellent, stellar, state of the art, etc. It seems some of these treatments might be more accurately portrayed as: the costliest we have, obsolete, ineffective, barbaric. I’m sure there are a lot of good doctors in the U.S., thank goodness. However, when even good doctors are at the mercy of a larger, institutionalized, business oriented medical system, well, sometimes their hands are figuratively tied. Extravagant malpractice suits are the sword of Damocles hanging over the head of each and every physician in the U.S. Sometimes the malpractice suits even make the extortionate pricing too often used by hospitals, clinics and other providers look trivial.

By designing/allowing extravagant malpractice suits into the bigger picture of the healthcare system those controlling the system gave themselves a ” big stick” with which to threaten recalcitrant physicians.

The stem cell issue is just one of many treatment issues which have plagued our medical system over the past few decades. The healthcare system in the U.S. has developed a track record of giving highly preferential treatment to those treatments marketed by big, wealthy corporations. Pharmaceuticals immediately come to mind.

Some of the treatments which are either hard to obtain, largely ignored or actively lobbied against, even made illegal at some point if they still aren’t, include: marijuana, stem cell therapy, neurofeedback, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and various cancer treatments offered in other countries but banned in the U.S. I’m sure there are more.

The point is this: Our healthcare system needs to be primarily and uncompromisingly dedicated to supporting and sustaining good health for all people. Right now it is severely compromised by individuals who are using the importance of health and healthcare to contaminate our healthcare system with, what amount to, various avenues and degrees of extortion in a sociopathic pursuit of inordinate wealth.

We now know our world, our planet (or those who are paying attention know) is one single, large, system. When we tweak the system, for better or for worse, there are systemic consequences. For centuries we have had examples of the systemic effects altering a single component of a system can have. If a person’s liver stops functioning: the person dies. The whole person, not just the liver. As human beings we are all sub-systems within, what we undeniably now know is, the larger, unified system which is the Earth. The danger we face is in continuing to think and behave as if each seemingly separate free-standing entity, whether a person, cow, tree, continent or ocean is an independent entity unaffected by the other seemingly free-standing entities around it.

As a video which used to be shown before movies in the U.S. said: “There is no non-peeing section of the pool”. Our environment is like a large pool, it’s all connected and there is no “non-peeing” section. What happens to the ocean off New Jersey affects Shanghai, and vice-versa. With some events proximity makes some difference; the closer a place, a people, are to the event, the greater the impact. Yet even small doses of a poison, continued over a long enough period of time, are going to affect the whole system.

Therein lies the problem with so many of the answers that industries and governments (and those controlling them) want to hand to the rest of us. So many, if not all, of the answers are lacking in adequate consideration of the systemic consequences of what is being proposed. Or, if the systemic consequences are being considered, there is a Machiavellian agenda afoot which gives little or no weight to the health and well-being of the majority of people on the planet. It is the cognizance of this latter possibility that underlies many, if not all, of the “conspiracy theories” we encounter.

The “mainstream” culture in the U.S., the government, industry, media, seem to want us to view the systemic reality that is our planetary ecosystem only one component at a time. We’re supposed to believe there is no critical interconnection between the components (seemingly independent entities). We are supposed to ignore the system as a whole. In actuality, each part, each component, of our planet is in constant energetic, chemical and/or physical interaction, communication if you will, with every other part. Just as our body is a whole system with each part in constant communication, via energetic, chemical and physical affects, with every other part. What happens if our planet’s “liver” fails?

This consequences of this interconnectedness has been referred to at times as the “butterfly effect”. That is an extreme, but not unfounded, conceptualization of the systemic reality we live within.

It’s time we not only face this reality but alter our thinking and behavior to properly take it into account. Air pollution in China affects us all. The radioactive water leaking from the Fukushima reactor in Japan is poisoning the whole ocean. The inordinate materialism being promoted in advertisements, movies and other media from the U.S. is affecting the collective psyche around the world. You see, it’s not just about air, water, or soil pollution, it’s about everything. Including the physicality, mentality and spirituality of all people, everywhere.

Some want to see our Earth as a being named “Gaia”. I have no problem with that. Whether our planet, our home is a sentient being or not really should make no difference in how we treat it (her). Our undeniable reality is that the Earth is our home, our only life-support system, and we need to give much, much greater respect and consideration to that reality than is being shown at this time.

What are our natural resources? Essentially they are the inherent qualities of the planet we live upon. None of us created them or contributed to their existence. However, as we know, many if not all of them are necessary for our lives. Without the air, water, food, shelter, medicinal substances, that our provided by our natural resources we would die. Without the beauty and recreational opportunities inherent in our natural resources our lives would be much less enjoyable, if even tolerable.

Natural resources include the plants that grow and the animals that inhabit the Earth. Natural resources are the source of all the raw materials that all products are made from. Even what scientists require in order to create “synthetics”. Without the naturally occurring base materials there would be no synthetics. We come to the Earth with nothing and everything we have while we’re here has essentially been provided to us by forces beyond our control. Everything. That makes the naturally occurring resources of our planet (and others) pretty valuable, doesn’t it?

It is true that humans very often take a natural resource, add some ingenuity and work, and thereby create something more useful to human life than the raw material alone. Clothing, houses, automobiles, medicines, works of art, musical instruments, books, computers, jewelry, beer, wine! Humans have bred some plants to produce more or better food products than they did previously.

However, it’s worked the other way with plants also, nutritional value has been reduced in some strains. And similar claims can also be made for about every natural resource. At some time one or more human beings have tried to create something with one or the other natural resources which has ended up being of less value than the raw material. Trial and error, we humans seem to do a lot of that.

Somewhere along the line some people decided that because of some arbitrary situation in their life they actually own one or more natural resources. Maybe they were born into a “royal” family with a longstanding (but never the less arbitrary) claim. Or maybe they had friends within one or more governments that were ready and willing to pass laws that proclaimed they now have ownership of certain natural resources. In any and all of these cases, assertions of ownership have only worked because there were sufficient other people ready to support that assertion. All such assertions are arbitrary in that they are devised and implemented solely out of the volition of the human beings involved. In other words, if I say I now own New York, and if I can get enough people in positions of power and a sufficient army to support the claim, then I own New York. That’s how it works. We all came with nothing, everything that is, every single solitary natural resource on Earth, has been provided to us freely by forces beyond our control. Every product that exists is produced from these resources.

Whether by design or default, currently we are allowing individuals or small groups of individuals to claim ownership of massive amounts of the Earth’s natural resources. Is this really how we want to conduct ourselves? This type of practice, among other things, leads to competition among the individuals and groups vying for ownership. It has led to wars and will undoubtedly lead to more if the practice is continued. It leads to inflationary, greed based pricing of the resources and works toward the impoverishment of the general population. The psycho/emotional effects of a competition/greed based culture in general are to be seen within populations around the world: fear, anxiety, disenfranchisement, depression, or vanity, narcissism.

When enough people wake up to the reality that private ownership of natural resources, and all similar cultural structures, can only exist with the cooperation of the general population, then we will see significant change within systems take place. In the past this has often just meant that the group controlling the resources changes and the same greed/competition model stays in place. We need something better. We need to realize that as a species that our fates are inextricably intertwined. We need to realize the mutuality of our plight and then to act upon that realization. We need to utilize, to apply the magnificent body of knowledge that already exists within the disciplines of psychology, physiology, sociology, medicine, anthropology, ethics, and spiritual studies in the design and maintenance of our social and industrial systems. Economically we don’t need socialism, communism or capitalism. We need a hybrid born in knowledge and reason with the well-being of all of humanity as a goal!

A key foundational piece of wisdom comes when we realize that, in general, looking at the basics of our biology and spirituality, what is good for one person’s body and spirit provides us with a model of what is good for the body and spirit of humanity as a whole.